I gave my first public talk on Python

On the 29th of February my employer organized a Python meetup, PyRa2024, at their office in Poznań, and I was encouraged by a few colleagues to do a talk there. I wasn’t sure what to talk about, I don’t feel like have anything interesting to say about Python, even though I work with it every day. But later on, is struck me: I can talk about MicroPython! It will be fresh, I have not heard about anyone else talking about it, and I already the content ready, I could present my projects that I described on this blog.

And so my presentation “MicroPython - how to start” was born. I talked on how to make a weather station from a Rapsberry Pi Pico, basically the content of these blog posts:

Raspberry Pi Pico Weather Station - part I

Raspberry Pi Pico Weather Station - part II

Powering Raspberry Pi Pico with AA batteries (Weather Station Part III)

I was stressing about the whole thing for weeks before, but when I went up to the stage, I just started talking, and the whole thing went smoothly, even when at one point Thonny decided to not work as intended, something that never had happened to me before. The beauty of Murphy’s law and live coding.

I had a Pico with me, and I spent most of the talk running code from it, even showing how to do a MQTT integration with a broker on my laptop.

After the talk I got a lot of questions from the very kind audience. The questions were so good and in-depth, that for an embarrassingly high percentage of them my answer was “I don’t know such details” :D And the cherry on top was this one person who came up to me at the end and said that they came to the meetup specifically for my presentation. If you are reading this, thanks again for coming and for the kinds words <3

BTW, the other speaker, Jacek Kołodziej, had a very interesting talk about Python’s GIL, check it out!

This is me showing a bunch of cables with a Pico somewhere along it, the pic taken from the How to monitor 12V battery charge with a Raspberry Pi Pico blog post. Thank you Karolina for taking the photo and for the support from the first row <3

So that was my first talk, and let’s hope it won’t be the last. Thanks for reading!